There's a slow-motion aspect to publishing a novel. The writing itself is slow (for most of us), and then comes the long waiting for others to read your book and give you feedback. The editing and proofreading proceeds in fits and starts. Even after your publisher sets a print date (in my case April 27, 2010), the whole thing still feels like a dream. You've received your advance and seen your (stunning) book jacket, but you can't quite believe the book will ever truly appear.

And then there's a day like today when I woke up and found that, out of the blue, The Poacher's Son had become available for preorder on Amazon.com. And not just the book—suddenly, there was an audiobook, too. And the actor who is reading my book, John Bedford Lloyd, is someone I actually knew from television and movies. I'm not normally in a rush for time to pass (we have so little of it), but April can't come soon enough.